Parent behaviors related to masculine, feminine, and androgynous sex role orientations.

Abstract

Male and female college students were administered the Berzins-Welling ANDRO scale, a measure of psychological androgyny, and the Parent Behavior Form (PBF) in a counterbalanced design. Subjects of each gender were classified into one of four sex role categories: masculine typed, feminine typed, androgynous, or indeterminate. Parent scale differences indicated that reported parental affection principally differentiates male groups, whereas parental cognitive or achievement encouragement and permissiveness differentiate female sex role categories. Indetcrminates consistently reported the least parental warmth and cognitive involvement, whereas androgynous subjects generally reported the highest. The results indicate that new conceptualizations of sex role orientations, which consider masculine and feminine characteristics to be independent, uncorrelated dimensions, are distinctively related to reported parental child-rearing practices.Recent efforts have been directed toward an assessment of the degree to which individuals endorse culturally sex-typed statements about themselves (Bern, 1974;Spence, Helmreich, & Stapp, 1975; Berzins, Welling, & Wetter, Note 1). Since males are culturally expected to behave in an "instrumental" (Johnson, 1963), more goal-directed, dominant, cognitive and socially ascendant manner, the endorsement of these characteristics about oneself has been taken as an index of masculinity. On the other hand, traditional feminine sex roles involve "expressive" (Johnson, 1963), emotional, sensitive, supportive, and noncompetitive components. Even though males or females may be "typed" as masculine or feminine, it has recently been suggested (Bern, 1974;Constantinople, 1973;Spence et al., 1975; Berzins, Note 2) that masculinity and femininity do not represent the bipolar ends of a single continuum but instead are independent, uncorrelated dimensions. Thus, it is

The Role of the Father in Child Development

“…Masculine women reported rejecting relationships with both parents. Kelly and Worell (1976) reported similar results with respect to the possible antecedents of androgynous sex-roles but painted a markedly less negative picture of the antecedents of cross-typed perceptions. Other studies report that both boys and girls develop less traditionally sex-stereotyped self-perceptions and attitudes about male and female roles when their mothers work outside the home (see Hoffman, 1974, andLamb, 1982b, for reviews) and when their fathers are highly involved in child care (Baruch & Barnett, 1981;Radin, 1978;Radin & Sagi, 1982).…”

Aggressiveness, dominance, developmental factors, and serum cholesterol level in college males

“…The Parent Behavior Form (PBF; Kelly and Worell, 1976) was used to assess various dimensions of the child-rearing patterns of each parent. The measure is composed of 13 scales; each scale contains nine statements that describe parental behaviors as viewed from the perspective of the child.…”

A Multifactorial Approach to the Study of Gender Characteristics

“…The original parenting interviews had been coded by two raters for over 150 specific parenting behaviors, and various parenting factors were later identified (Koestner, Franz, & Weinberger, 1990). Because retrospective studies pointed toward parental warmth and strictness as major determinants of gender-related traits (Kelly & Worrell, 1976;Orlofsky, 1979), we selected eight parenting factors related to these broad dimensions to include in our developmental analyses: maternal warmth, maternal role satisfaction, matemal use of praise, general matemal strictness, matemal inhibition of aggression, maternal use of physical punishment, paternal warmth, and paternal strictness. Two additional parenting variables were included in the developmental analyses because they were explicitly related to gender socialization.…”